Like Chad Stahelski’s John Wick franchise, David Ayer’s The Beekeeper has the kind of goofy action premise that, if played straight enough, could have served as a springboard for ludicrous delights. The problem is that in the process of maintaining its gimmick — a revenge saga in which Jason Statham plays a beekeeper and retired black ops killer — the film forgets to have any fun.
For his part, Statham is utterly committed to playing a stoic, mournful apiarist with a penchant for dismemberment. However, the film around him is neither dramatically adept enough to carry any emotional heft nor witty enough to hold your attention. It doesn’t help that the script by Kurt Wimmer is packed with seemingly endless quips and puns that seldom land.
Is the action at least worthwhile? Maybe, on paper; there’s likely a version of the movie that could have been carved from Ayer’s footage in a way that makes an impact. (Assuming Ayer had more say here than he did on Suicide Squad, perhaps it’s time to stop demanding the latter’s #AyerCut). In any case, what ends up on the screen radiates reluctance. It feels far too hesitant to put its gory B(ee)-movie sensibilities on full display. There’s a term in academia for this sort of middling, weightless “nothing” of a movie dumped in theaters early in the year: “Fuck You, It’s January!” (See also: Night Swim.)
The Beekeeper is preposterous in a dumb but not fun way.
Ayer and cinematographer Gabriel Beristain do a fine job of creating a sense of mystery around Statham’s Adam Clay, whom we first see entering a shadowy, rundown barn in silhouette. Before we see his face, we see the distinct shape of his white beekeeping suit. He’s an astronaut whose exploration is fauna instead of the stars, and he’s both confident and highly competent at taking care of a wild hornet’s nest, in what looks like a giant kill room from Saw.
While this creepy setting does end up playing a part in the action later on, it’s soon revealed that it’s owned by a normal, unassuming good Samaritan named Eloise (Phylicia Rashad), on whose Massachusetts ranch Adam houses his beehives. Why she owns a building that resembles a slaughterhouse is anyone’s guess; it’s as though the filmmakers were hell-bent on a spot for horror-adjacent kills, but they couldn’t figure out where to put it until the last minute.
This disconnect between appearance and actual premise is easy to ignore at first, but the oddities when it comes to the movie’s setting continue to pile up. Adam mostly keeps to himself, but when Eloise ends up the victim of an expensive banking scam, the lone bee enthusiast starts tracing the fraudsters up their food chain, leading to a mutual escalation. More goons, law enforcement, and private security pile up on one side. On the other, Adam remains a one-man army who never breaks a sweat — though this is also a major problem.
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